a cup of coffee in peace and quiet

Inside the strong sunlight, an explosion of colours: in the foreground colourful fabrics wound themselves around women’s vigorous bodies. Here and there ebony faces, with heads in long turbans wrapped in a thousand different ways, moved among the fruit and vegetable stalls; the gestures of naked children enlivened the chatter of colours. I could hear nothing. At times it was enough for me just to stay in that exotic light, that silent 3 X 4 fresco for a few minutes, to make the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen of Jimmy’s cafeteria almost bearable.
The noise of plates and forks grew more insistent, and the voices more invasive and chaotic – the men from Lanerossi had arrived: there are so many of them, all shouting as if they were still surrounded by the din of the looms, they go on using the same tone of voice even in the cafeteria, so even to think about anything else, to give in to tiredness or slip behind the wall, is difficult, difficult. So in the end that potent sun turns into a cold sign, and the dark black bodies move away, leaving only the trace of fading colours, a dark black dot on the wall.
Black. No, today is definitely not a good day. Today I am really black.
“Did they say there’s been an act of terrorism”?
It was the voice of Omar, the Algerian friend I meet with in the cafeteria for a bite to eat and a bit of a chat. I pointed to the photo published in the local paper, where you could see what was left of a plane that had crashed: PLANE CRASHES AT LINATE. 118 DEAD. It was the first time I’d heard Omar speak such good Italian. Generally he preferred French, or at times Arabic. I was surprised. I answered him in Arabic, with an edge of anger:
“MA GALUSH SHKUN”.⁽¹⁾
“RUBBAMA BINLADEN”,⁽²⁾ added Omar in Arab, almost as though to camouflage himself in my voice.
That name seemed to ricochet in the canteen, and I heard its echo come back to us like a sharp slap in the face.
“DUI BSHUIA! MAZAL MAARFIN WALU”.⁽³⁾ And while I whispered these words to Omar, almost furtively, I felt the wish to disappear, to be somewhere else welling up inside me.
There between the bags of chilli peppers and the heaps of bananas (chilli peppers and bananas, no less!) there was a small boy sitting on the red ground. Next to him a woman, maybe his mother.
I thought of my wife, who had arrived in Schio a year ago, and of my six-month old baby daughter, and of the child that was about to be born. With surprise in her voice she had said that – may 11th September be damned – for some time people on the streets of Schio looked at her differently. I could see the looks, puzzled and sometimes suspicious, that people gave her and our baby. I recognized those looks. After you’ve lived in a place for ten years, nothing gets by you. After 11th September something had changed. “But what is this 11th September?”,she asked. Lucky her, she doesn’t speak much Italian and can’t understand the questions – at least she doesn’t have to answer. For me it’s different. People would come up to me, and sooner or later the questions arose: “You who are Arab or Muslim, what do you think of Bin Laden?”. I really think that by now I’ve been asked this question more often than all the other questions an immigrant has to answer: “What’s your name? How old are you? How long have you been here in Italy?”. For new arrivals to Italy, automatically added to the list now there was also: “You who are Arab or Muslim, what do you think of Bin Laden?”.
Now the scene of the mother with her child drawn on the wall of JIMMI’s cafeteria was hidden by the enormous body of a worker who was sitting down slowly at the table opposite ours.
Again I thought of my wife, protected by her lack of knowledge of Italian, perhaps also from the recent news reports, absorbed as she is by the Arab soap operas. Maybe it’s better that way, fewer problems, as my fellow countrymen say, pretending not to know Italian so they won’t have to respond.
Omar was really worried, and couldn’t shut up.
“If they haven’t said it up to now….then maybe it wasn’t terrorism. Remember? on 11th September they announced it right away…an act of terrorism…Bin Laden…”.
I was annoyed. His anxiety was turning into an unstoppable stream of words. I found it hard to bear. It seemed to me we should do our best to be quiet. Almost to make him stop talking, or maybe to demonstrate my silence, my distraught silence, I added:
“This time it’s different”.
By this I meant that 11th September was yes, an act of terrorism, but not here, far away, in the United States, and that I had never been in the United States and maybe the people around us hadn’t been there either, not even Mario who in his friendly way, perhaps without knowing what had happened, every once in a while called over from a nearby table: “Oh,Talibans come on over when you’re done, we’ll have a cup of coffee before we have to go back to the trenches.”
This time it was different. 118 dead at Linate, in Milan, in Italy, really close by, I’d been there to pick up my wife when she arrived from Casablanca, I’d taken off and landed myself there on more than one occasion.
“118 dead….it could have been a mechanical problem”.
Omar seemed to have understood how upset I was, he seemed to have read in my thoughts the weight of that report. 118 dead. At Linate. A place crashed. Maybe an act of terrorism.
Muslims, Arabs, terrorists, extremists, Talibans, war, peace, infinite justice. And then the arrests all over the world. Worldwide, yes, but not here in the province of Venice, in the mythical northeast, at Schio, where everyone works hard, including Muslims like us, Arabs like us, the Talibans of the moment. And yet, now that I remember, someone had found the time to write on the walls of Schio: “Arab bastards”. But then things calmed down because here we have our work to do, and we were all together again, intent only on grinding away inside the great production machine of the northeast that hadn’t stopped, sometimes it slowed down but then it started up again and we had to keep up with the rhythm of the new orders, and we didn’t even have time to think about things, to feel resentment, or hate…or love.
This time it’s different.
I would have rather been alone. I was afraid of being here with my wife and daughter, having to hide, to face up to it, to avoid the echo of the news that already was weighing on my mind, turning into a hurricane of looks full of pity, hate, suspicion.
All around us people were relaxed, nothing had changed, nothing had happened, “But how can those eejits keep Del Piero as a reserve?” “Shut up Taliban, you don’t know nothin’ about football.”
The TV hanging from the ceiling was talking to itself.
His heart full of anxiety, Omar was talking to himself, too:
“But with all the checking they do in the airports!”
Turning around slightly to one side, I could see the painting on the wall again, the women, the sun, the boy.
What was it that the boy held in his hands? I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear the noise of that market: maybe then I could have saved myself, we would all be have been saved.
The only thing we could hear was the buzz of voices of the workers who had finished eating by now, and then the music that announced the 1 o’clock news, and then the first piece of news:
“The hypothesis of an attempt…”
It’s the end, run, sink into the earth, become invisible, come on kid, open your hand, open your hand...
“…has been excluded”
“The hypothesis of a terrorist attempt has been excluded”..
“The cause of the accident was due to radar malfunctioning, to poor visibility caused by fog”.
A clear, constant, sweet light spread all around.
“Radar, not Moroccan”.
“Fog, not Algerian”.
“Poor visibility, not Taliban”.
“The invisibility…”.
I looked Omar in the eyes, I looked Mario in the eyes.
“Come on, the coffee’s on me”, I said.
Moreno, the foreman, sat down with us.
We sipped our coffee in peace and quiet.

Chaki Fouad was born in Brouj, Marocco, in 1968. At the end of the 1980s he interrupted his study of the law in Casablanca to come to Italy. He worked in textile and mechanics factories, and at the same time was active as a cultural mediator in local schools and community centres in the Province of Vicenza, where he was living. In 2004 he decided to return to Marocco.